This is Zeb, short for Zebedee (as in the Magic Roundabout character, ‘cos he’s a bit bouncy at times. ). We got him from the local shelter a couple of weeks ago and he’s settling in wonderfully well. He’d been there for almost two months (one of the longest ‘inmates’), and we’ve no idea why, because he’s a total sweetie and so well behaved.

He’s great with kids and other dogs. In fact, he seems to love everybody, though next door’s cat isn’t too keen on him. He picks things up fast, and has already learnt ‘down’, ‘stay’, ‘leave it’, ‘wait’, etc. (he already knew ‘sit’ and ‘give paw’), but he doesn’t want to learn ‘heel’ – it’s far more fun to pull ahead & sniff all those new smells when he’s out for a walk.

Unfortunately, we lost Karl’s dad after a short illness, a couple of weeks ago. We’re still trying to come to terms with that, but also with the fact that we’ve spent nearly all our savings now on traveling backwards and forwards to the UK to spend as much time with him as we could. Any money we have left now needs to go towards my green card application (Karl’s work will pay for his). Which means the adoption will have to be on hold now indefinitely.

If we can get the green card quickly enough (we’ve been told it may only take a year for Karl), we may look into doing foster-adopt. That’s relatively cheap (I hate putting a cost to these things), and will get us to parenthood much faster than having to wait for our savings to build up again. But, we’ll see how things go.

This is just a quick phone pic that Karl snapped while we were waiting for our realtor to show up. From the fact that he was snapping pics before we’d even seen inside, I think we both really wanted the place right from the start. Luckily, the inside is even nicer, and we said pretty much straight away that we’d take it. It’s not as small as it looks either – it goes back quite a long way.

We’ll miss the swimming pool not living in an apartment, but it’ll be so nice to bring a baby home to our own house. OK, back to the packing. We move in just over a week.

Our new street (well, really it's more like a private drive off of the main street)

Actually, the last three months have gone surprisingly quickly. Lots of hanging out with friends and having fun, plus a trip up to Santa Cruz for a friend’s wedding. Nothing new to report on the adoption front – been shown to a couple of expectant moms, but (obviously) not picked, and have decided to go with an attorney up in San Francisco. We need to get around to making an appointment with them, & planning a trip up there for a long weekend.

We wanted to work with an attorney that our adoption agency knew and trusted. They recommended three to us, only one of which was in LA. We had a look at the local one’s web site, but it made us very uncomfortable. It made it sound like they really push expectant women into signing away their parental rights. Nothing at all was mentioned about having any other choices, let alone what they’d do to support someone making those choices. So, we’re going with one of the ones based further away, but who sound like they’re very supportive, and help guide expectant parents to make the choice that’s right for them. More on that once we’ve got some more details/been to see them.

We’ve also added our profiles to a couple of websites – MyAdoptionProfile and ParentGallery – so we’ll see what comes of those, too. (Only spam, so far.)

I keep thinking at least we can use the waiting time to prepare for the baby’s arrival. We have plenty of time on our hands to buy all the things we’ll need, and read all those books on our list… But then around Christmas and New Year, internet friends of ours almost (almost!) had a baby placed with them. Unfortunately, that placement wasn’t to be and they’re back to waiting again, but they had less than a week’s notice about the whole thing. We’re so sorry they had to go through that, but it’s made us realise more than ever that this could all happen for us at any time. And with very little notice. (It’s also driven home the fact that nothing’s a given. Not until the birth mom relinquishes her rights and actually becomes the birth mom, not just the mom. But that’s a whole other post.) Which means we really should get ourselves ready.

So, queue the shopping!

We haven’t bought any of the big stuff yet. We haven’t decided whether to buy a cot/crib or a co-sleeper for by the bed, and I don’t think we’ll get a pushchair/stroller yet – we’ll use a wrap or sling to begin with. Once this storm leaves California behind – hopefully by the weekend – we’ll be heading out to the Fashion District downtown, & hunting out some good wrap material in the fabric shops there. I imagine we’ll need to get a car seat soon too, in case we have to travel to pick up the baby (not that we’ve actually got a car to put it in!).

A lot of the other bits and pieces have been bought or made though. These little cuties arrived this morning:

They’re made from organic cotton and organic soy, and they’re wonderfully soft. I want clothes made from this fabric! These are the tiny 0-3 month size. I have a fair bit of patience for sewing, but not a very good sewing machine, and trying to do hems on the 3-6 month size was bad enough. I decided to just buy the things we’ll need for the first three months. (I’ll be using the same fold-back-cuffs design that these have on anything else I make though!) I’ve bought the nappies/diapers (organic cotton Chinese tri-folds) and some organic hemp burp cloths too, which arrived last week, along with a baby brush & comb, and this giraffe:

It’s made from natural rubber and food paint, so safe to chew on. I think the squeek could get a little annoying, but I guess I’m just gonna have to get used to toys that make a noise. The brush and comb are generic baby ones; I’m not sure if we’ll need something different if our baby is African-American. We’ll need to learn a lot of new hair care techniques then, since we both have very fine, straight Celtic hair.

Our reading is coming on though. I’ve read The Baby Book pretty much from cover to cover, and last week read through The Vaccine Book. There’s a lot of info to take in there. Karl needs to read that one now, & then we need to go through it together & decide on which vaccines to get. We know that childhood diseases can be devastating, and that vaccines have done an amazing job of eradicating some of them (at least for those of us in the developed world), but vaccines themselves aren’t without their problems, so we’re going to decide on each one of them on it’s own merits. It seems more sensible than an all or nothing approach. Though having read the book, I’m utterly appalled at the vaccines that are grown in monkey kidney cells and fetal cow serum! Since that one’s just for a stomach bug, I think we’ll be giving it a miss.

This is another post for Mel’s Show & Tell. If I try to do something for this at least every other week, it’ll give me a reason to keep updating this blog, even though nothing much is happening!

We were so glad we’d brought hiking boots with us! The roads were icy & treacherous, though it does look kinda pretty. Still, I’m glad we don’t have to deal with that too often. We’ve turned into such sun worshipers since moving to California.

Now we’re back, we’re doing some more preparation for the baby. Ordered a few more items, and have begun to narrow down the list of baby names. I’ve also done a bit more sewing, and made two very cute hooded bath towels yesterday. I’ll post a pic of those once they’ve been washed.

See what the rest of the class is showing in this week’s Show & Tell.

I’ve been spending some of the waiting time cooking, partly to empty the fridge before we head back to the UK for the holidays I admit, but partly ‘cos I enjoy it and Karl’s got a lot of work on lately, so he’s been too tired to cook.

I’ve also been buying new cookbooks. And some un-cook books. The latest two are Vegan Soul Kitchen and Entertaining in the Raw, which both have some amazing recipes. I’m looking forward to trying a few of the more complex recipes when we get back. We also got a large folder of recipes when we got our new blender. We’re running out of room for them! That’s the folder sitting on top of all the cookbooks:

That’s about 60 books and pamphlets, plus that large binder of recipes, and a few vegan nutrition guides. There’s cookbooks there on Chinese food, Russian, Jewish, Indian, Southwest American, North African, East African, French, Caribbean… and nearly all of them are vegan or vegetarian. There’s some on vegan baking and making vegan ‘cheeses’. Even a book of just vegetarian Christmas recipes. A few of them I’ve had since I first went veggie 26 years ago.

We really do need to stop buying them. We have a rule now that we only buy new ones if they’re really different, or have a lot of recipes we don’t have in other books (hence the two latest buys). But in the meantime, we’ve had to make more room for the ones we do have. We’ve had to move the jewelry box you can see on the right, so now we can squeeze in maybe a dozen or so more. Hmm, maybe a trip to the book shop is in order..?

See what the rest of the class is showing in this week’s Show & Tell.

Phew! Now that that’s out of the way, we can really start to feel like we’re waiting for our baby to come home.

Our profile’s been shown a couple of times by our agency now, & their new birth mother outreach program seems to be beginning to work. It’s a new thing for them, so we’re amongst their first prospective adoptive parents to be shown. Since it’s still such a small thing for them though, we’re giving serious thought again to signing up with an attorney too. So, our paperwork trail isn’t over quite yet…